The Premier League paid more than twice as much in wages to players than any other European league, a new report reveals.

The unprecedented figures are shown in UEFA’s Club Licensing Benchmarking Report for the 2015 financial year.

It says the spending on players alone for England’s top flight was €2.69 billion, an average wage bill per club of €134.5m.

Clubs from the second top spending competition, Italy's Serie A, paid a total of €1.309bn in wages at an average of €65.5m across its 20 clubs.

Manchester City were the Premier League's second biggest spenders on wages (Image: Nigel French/PA)

Third was the German Bundesliga with €1.251bn, an average of €69.5m per annum for their 18 sides.

“For the first time on record, the total wage bill of the highest-paying league (English Premier League) was more than double that of the next highest-paying league (Italy’s Serie A), with the strength of the British pound in 2015 just pushing the English clubs over this line,” Goal.com quotes the report.

The list of big names at Barcelona made it the year's top-spending club (Image: Reuters)

“The aggregate wage bills of the 20 Italian, 20 Spanish and 18 German top-division clubs continue to converge and are within five per cent of each other, with Germany third on aggregate wages but now second on average club wages.”

Not surprisingly, Barcelona and Real Madrid’s wage bills were top of the pile with wage bills of €340m and €289m respectively.